PRACTICEM Archives - Mindful Happiness

February 14, 2018 By Admin

Subtle and Direct Experiences of Happiness

Khenpo Sherab Zangpo’s 2017 publication The Path: A Guide to Happiness, Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications has much to offer about how to become a happier person. Read over the listing below and see what you may be missing.

Try this mantra: “I am happy the way I am.” “I am happy with what I have now.” Remember: “You can’t always get what you want.” “All you/we need is love.”
Long-term transformational happiness requires many years of mindfulness practice via meditation and yoga. It requires that you not succumb to the habit of judging all experiences as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It requires that you radically accept your suffering, and that you fully enjoy your happiness – but without trying to hold on to it. You cannot avoid suffering, and you cannot hold on to joy and happiness. Just BE with it.
Since happiness is largely a state of mind, it is true that it is an inside job.
Let go of rigid attachments/desires/cravings for sensory pleasures. Let go of endless efforts to avoid suffering and pain. You cannot do it! Practice fully experiencing life, the good, the bad, and the neutral. Detach from greed, pride, ego-accomplishments, and craved relationships. Practice being satisfied!
Practice calm abiding when engaged in awareness of mind, body, feelings/sensations, and consciousness regarding all arising and falling phenomena in life. Get out of the endless cycle of partial satisfaction with short-term gains, and relief when suffering fails to reach you. Less is more here! Going with the flow of life is helpful.
Notice that all emotional moods, feelings, sensations are short-term in their arising and falling away. It is all about the totality of impermanence of all things, including our own lives. Stop wasting energy working to suppress and avoid suffering and pain. It will happen; when it does simply radically accept it and use wise mind skills for living.
Realize that along with impermanence, everything comes from dependent origination. Nothing arises of itself; there are always causes and conditions to the arising and falling away of all human experiences. Change is a constant!
Pure joy does occur. When you notice it simply enjoy it, with full knowledge that it too will change. Be content with it and allow it to enter your mind and body. Enjoy your joy; be one with your happiness.
Happiness occurs only in present moment awareness; it does not occur in past-mind or in future-mind. These are simply memories of the past and projections into the future. You have no control over the past; it has already happened. You have no control over the future; plan for it but know you do not control it. Accept!
Like happiness, suffering is also subject to impermanence; it changes in time. All things change in time.
You may activate the feeling of joy and appreciation when meditating or doing yoga outdoors in nature. Can you meditate and complete asanas with an attitude of joy inside yourself? Practice this! Be the joy!
Negative mood states of anger, jealousy, anxiety, depression, fear, and trauma need to be faced and radically accepted without activating unhelpful behaviors. Stop self-medicating in fruitless hopes that it will bring joy and end suffering. It will not! Make space for them rather than treating them as your enemy. Befriending via wise mind skills and calm abiding may lead to reduced impact on your emotions. You may even make these conditions your allies, all trying to teach you something that will help you do better, be better. Use self-compassion often.
When emotionally reactive, directly observe the process of your mind to understand why you are experiencing what you are experiencing. Recognize, allow, investigate and reduce impact on the self (RAIN process). Realize that in the end, the ultimate end, everything is empty. Be skilled. Be happier.
Practice mindfulness, mindfulness meditation, vipassana meditation, yoga, loving kindness, compassion, and gratitude. All these practices will help you.
Study the Four Noble Truths and The Eight Fold Path to understand all phenomena and yourself more deeply. Skills here will lead to greater internal, lasting happiness.
For those of you more involved in Buddhist Psychology, you may want to read Nagarjuna’s, Fundamentals of the Middle Way or Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva. May you have great success in learning how to be a happier person! There is much wisdom in these writings.

Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton Sangha

Author of Mindful Happiness

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!

Emptiness – Meditation Practice The Brahma-Viharas (higher abodes) include four powerful meditation practices ( Loving Kindness/Maitri or Metta; Compassion/Karuna; Sympathetic Joy/Mudita; and, Equanimity/Upekkha) that involve boundless radiation outwardly all the way into the infinite universe. These boundless or infinite space meditations, working with deep absorption and projecting kindness outwardly, may lead to positive changes. Experienced […]

So Many Ways to Self-Medicate – It Just Brings More Suffering Very often poor child-parent (child-caretaker) object relations, attachment with care takers, and attunement by care takers negatively impact young children early in their lives. The well-documented scientific fact that environmental conditions play a more important role in gene-expression than pure genetics implies clearly that […]

Supervision and Self-Care in Trauma Therapy Today there is an ever-increasing demand for effective trauma therapy. Our American clinical history on this matter leaves much to be desired. John N. Briere and Cheryl B. Lanktree offer important suggestions on how to use clinical supervision and self-care in your clinical work with clients suffering from serious […]

Mindful Happiness: Joy is Within Reach – It is Up to You to Choose It! We all live in a very troubled world with lots of greed, hate, warfare, and danger. Many of us use distractions (addictions, cell phone habits, eating, gathering, games, etc.) to make it through the days. This is true! However, […]

Self-Medication: Is Your Hand-Held Device a Dopamine Device? Mindfulness Activities: Here is a simple activity that may inform you about your personal level of addiction to your digital/electronic devices. Simply click the link below to download the PDF Worksheet; answer each question according to your personal opinions. Dr-Anthony-Quintiliani_HandHeldDeviceActivity Be sure to complete the meditation activity […]

PTSD – The How and Why of Mindfulness and Meditation Many recent research studies have been published on the benefits of mindfulness skills and meditation practice for various clinical conditions. Common interventions with these practices are used to improve anxiety, chronic pain, depression, depression relapse, addictions, addictions relapse, eating problems, and trauma. Since the year […]

Mindfulness Practices to help Reduce Your Worry & Suffering My last post dealt with various mindfulness-based practices and skills that may help to reduce created suffering due to excessive worrying. I will add a few more practices in this post. First, let us go back to Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and his Meditations. In Book 2, page 14 […]

Preverbal Trauma – Therapy Problems A. R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC Preverbal trauma (hereafter PVT) is one of the most pervasively troubling human conditions. PVT occurs when a preverbal child is exposed to parental, caretaker, or other forms of abuse. This abuse may be sexual, physical, or emotional. This form of abuse is so destructive because […]

Inner Workings of Self-Medication Process To continue our discussion about the self-medication process we will first turn to the human brain. The human brain is the most complex system known to science. Here, my comments will be basic. Self-medication often has roots in the quality of our earliest childhood experiences (attachment and object relations with […]

Mindful Observation Through Mindful Breathing The following guided meditation is a combination meditation from Asanga’s Grounds of Hearers, Jam-Yang-Shay-Pa’s concentration meditation on the breath, and the Anapanasati Sutta. These guided meditation instructions have been simplified and combined for contemporary use by lay meditators. Observation of Observation – Mindfulness in Breathing Contemplate breathing in and out with complete […]

Showing Deep Love & Respect Loved Ones Lost This is a very brief post about love and respect for “lost loved ones” – those special people who have left their human body and mind behind. Two Rituals 1) Loving Kindness Meditation for Lost Loved Ones After breathing slowly and deeply for a few minutes in silence, […]

More on Self-Compassion Practices Suffering and happiness represent opposites in human emotional experience. In our culture we often equate happiness with what we HAVE and suffering with the GAP between what we have versus what we want. Material possessions tend not to lead to intrinsic happiness; joy based on materials gains is often short-lived – […]

Mindful Leadership Skills: How to Lead in Wise Mind Ways Researchers dealing with leadership skills have noted several acquired characteristics of effective leaders. These same skills may be used in spreading “the word” about how mindfulness and wise mind practices reduce stress reactivity, enhance compassion, and expand the possibilities for human happiness, inner peace and […]

Meditation on Gratitude – Why it is so Important The daily rapid vibrations from our fast-paced and sometimes dangerous world may impact us in ways that make unhealthy norms of being. The struggle to feel good enough, to have enough, to be somebody, to keep up with the raging ads about what you need NOW and […]

Consciousness, Emptiness, and Well Being This is an advanced post on the complex relationship among consciousness (awareness), emptiness, and well being. Readers with advanced understanding of Buddhist Psychology will recognize the inherent relationships among consciousness, emptiness, and well being and interactions with core Buddhist concepts and experiences such as happiness and suffering, impermanence, non-dual nature, […]

Setting Emotional Boundaries from Work to Life Anthony R. Quintiliani, Ph.D., LADC Sometimes setting emotional boundaries from the psychotherapy room to your life outside of work can be a difficult thing to do. Shifting from “experience near empathy” (Kohut), “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers), “hovering attention” (Freud), “the holding environment” in “intersubjective space” (Winnicott), and compassionate […]

What is Mindfulness – The Nature of Mindfulness This is an expanded second post on the nature of mindfulness. This post will begin with secular understandings, and end with basic spiritual path information. Generally mindfulness is a wide-ranging process with a special noticing quality. It focuses the power of attention leading to improved concentration. Mindfulness […]

Self-Reality Checks Are Needed in Your Mindful Clinical Practice It is highly important for helpers working in the co-occurring conditions field to become keenly aware of their own realities in practice and life that impact clinical effectiveness. Below I have listed four areas that show up in clinical surveys and added four more that I […]

Equanimity, Suffering, and Resilience It is said that equanimity (Pali – upekkha), the seventh factor of enlightenment and the tenth perfection, is an end-product of life-long personal practice in meditation and/or meditative yoga. It is about “walking the walk.” Some practitioners note that equanimity is the foundation for other helpful states of mind and body. […]

Mindfulness-Based Emotion Regulation The following emotional regulation practices (also called emotional balance skills) have been supported by over 2500 years of mindfulness training and current psychological research on human emotions. These practices/skills are to be practiced before they are needed, and directly applied when they are needed. Here is the list. 1) Practice noticing and […]